The Doomsday Clock is an internationally recognized design that conveys how close we are to destroying our civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making. First and foremost among these are nuclear weapons, but the dangers include climate-changing technologies, emerging... Read More

Do you think the hands of the Doomsday Clock should be closer to or farther from midnight?

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Lawrence M. Krauss

Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicist, a member of the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors, and the director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. A cosmologist, he has visited the Vatican to discuss the long-term future of life. He has won several honors for translating difficult scientific concepts into language general readers can understand. His most recent book is A Universe from Nothing.

Today, more than 25 years after the end of the Cold War, the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board have looked closely at the world situation and found it so threatening that the hands of the Doomsday Clock must once again be set at three minutes to midnight.

A careful review of threats leads the Bulletin's Science and Security Board to conclude that the risk of civilization-threatening technological catastrophe remains high, and that the hands of the Doomsday Clock should therefore remain at five minutes to midnight.